A bunch of us were sitting around in a warehouse, assembling these black plastic trays of food. There were trays of shrink-wrapped steaks, there were trays of vegetables, there was fresh fruit, there were trays of candies for the kids. We did some quick calculations, and for the size of our group we had approximately ten years' worth of food, if we stretched it.

Which was important, because the Earth was being taken over by aliens, who were wiping out all the humans and taking the land for themselves. We were going to create floating islands in the sea, using the floating crates to form the basis and where the food would be preserved by the cold water. "If the aliens see that we're abandoning the land to them, they couldn't POSSIBLY want to pursue us in the water, right"? the group leader assured the group.

With the confirmation of Scott Pruitt to head the EPA, I've been having ecological disaster dreams.

Last night I dreamt that oil and coal deregulation led to another rise in global temperatures, causing the Greenland ice sheet to reach tipping point and rapidly begin calving-off. This lowered the Earth's albedo, which caused Antarctica to rapidly follow suit. The calving of so many huge ice sheets (the size of states) caused great tidal waves around the world and raised sea level several feet, swamping all low-lying areas. Hundreds of millions were killed in floods that made the 2011 Tohoku tsunami look like small potatoes.

We were building some kind of brick wall by the ocean -- in reality Mrs NoCo has been tiling the bathrooms -- and in this otherwise long involved dream a worker walked past my wife smoking a cigarette. In the dream she grabbed the cigarette, took a few puffs off it, and casually handed it back to the guy.

In reality Mrs NoCo goes ballistic whenever a worker smoked at our job site. She especially lost her shit if somebody had the temerity to drop a butt to the ground and stamp it out, without picking it up afterwards. She is vehemently anti-smoking, never even tried grass for that reason. Why would I dream she bummed a puff ?

Scott Stewart and I were out shopping (he's a friend I had from playschool thru highschool, haven't seen him since), in an unfamiliar city, and at some point he suggested we carpool together rather than taking separate cars. So I parked my car and we continued on together.

But then he was done, and left. I couldn't remember where we left my car, and I wasn't familiar with the city we were in. I panicked and realized I might NEVER see my car again.

This weekend I built a table for a friend's deck out of leftover decking material. It'll last forever. I built it in two halves, that bolt together around a 4x4 on his deck.

Last night I dreamed I also built an airplane out of leftover cedar. The wings fit inside the fuselage and by turning both wings 90º, you could assemble a working airplane. It was almost like one of those wooden puzzles.

All week every night I've been dreaming about my whole family, even my dead parents and dead sister, getting together on a road trip. We end up driving someplace and getting stuck, or getting lost, or needing to get to some place beyond the end of the road. We get out of the car and begin hiking, but the trail become slippery or steep or submerged or invisible, and we stumble forward in increasingly frustrating anxiety.

There used to be -- or at least I think there used to be? Maybe I imagined the whole thing -- come to think of it it must have been imagined -- anyway...

Pike Place Market, the famous Seattle waterfront farmer's market, has (or had -- haven't been there in years...) these long concrete hallways lined with shops. Some of them were essentially underground, lit only by bare electric lights. Gawd, how much of this is real? Now that I'm describing it I can't say I remember ever visiting these locations in real life.

But, oh in my dreams, I have explored The Market's underground hallways over and over and over for probably forty years. There is (in my dreams at least) a record store in one of them that handles a lot of import LPs, including all the rare German Krautrock records I could never find in real life. Their prices are outrageous ($30-50 per disc) and I reluctantly have to put back all these records I've coveted for years.

My god, this whole thing has been an invention. I don't think any of it is real.

Last night, I was some place I didn't recognize. It was a city that was obviously at a river, and the surrounding countryside was kind of mountainous, maybe looking kind of Scandinavian. I was outside on the street, and kind of lost, with nowhere really to go, but walking around I found a train station, and got on a train. This headed off into the mountains. At one point, it was going up very steeply, and looking out of the window, you were looking down steep cliffs, hundreds of feet, to the water below, like looking down the side of a fjord. It gave me vertigo, so I had to not look (which is strange, because heights don't generally bother me). Eventually I got off the train, and found my way to some place that was kind of like a big old-fashioned apartment, kind of reminded me of student digs. There seemed to be several women living there in sort of a commune. One of them was explaining things to me about what they did. One of the others produced a bowl of of some colored stuff, looked like pieces of pastry. It was made from fruit, and tasted pretty good.Apparently they made crafty stuff like this for sale.

And then a cat woke me up. Usually, when I have a dream with a pretty good narrative like this, I find that it's being driven by the TV I fell asleep on. But in this case, I fell asleep on the baseball channel during the Mets-Yankees game, and when I woke up, the game had just started again in an encore presentation. So I don't know where this dream came from.